Zakarīyā ibn Muhammad al-Qazwīnī (circa 1203–83), was a distinguished Iranian scholar who was conversant in poetry, history, geography, and natural history. He served as legal expert and judge in several localities in Iran and at Baghdad. After traveling throughout Mesopotamia and Syria, he wrote his famous Arabic-language cosmography, 'Aja'eb ol-makhluqat wa qara'eb ol-mowjudat (The wonders of creation, or literally, Marvels of things created and miraculous aspects of things existing). This treatise, frequently illustrated, was immensely popular and is preserved today in many copies. It has been translated ...

Jābir ibn Hayyan (also known by his Latinized name Geber, circa 721–815) was a contemporary of the first Abbasids, who ruled circa 750–800, and one of the principal proponents of alchemy in the early Islamic period. The earliest biography of Jābir, in al-Fihrist, was written in the tenth century by Ibn al-Nadīm, a scholar and bibliographer living in Baghdad. It contains a fair number of legendary elements, although the list of works attributed to Jābir in this work has been shown by external evidence to be generally correct ...

Created in England in the late-12th century, this manuscript was intended to be a scientific textbook for monks. The manuscript is brief, at nine folios, and was designed as a compendium of cosmographical knowledge drawn from early Christian writers, such as Bede and Isidore, as well as the later Abbo of Fleury. Those writers, in turn, drew on classical sources, such as Pliny the Elder, for their knowledge but adapted it to be understood through the filter of Christianity. The 20 complex diagrams accompany and help to illustrate the texts ...

This manuscript is a collection of texts on mathematical astronomy and the natural sciences dating from early in the ninth century. The illuminations are mainly of astronomical content and are based on models from late antiquity. They include the occupations of the 12 months, the earliest surviving medieval illuminations of this type (folio 91 verso); an astronomical map (folio 113 verso); the constellations (folios 115 verso−121 recto); and the 12 winds (folio 139 recto). The manuscript was copied in Salzburg, apparently from a northern French exemplar, and was presumably ...

This astronomical manuscript is comprised of notes by al-Birjandi on a treatise by Qadi’zadah, which is itself a commentary on a work by al-Jighmini entitled al-Mulkhkhas fi al-hay’ah (Précis of astronomy). The manuscript is thus the work of three scientists specializing in mathematics and astronomy. Included are extensive hashiyah (marginal notes) on Qadi’zadah’s sharh (commentary) on the principles of astronomy by al-Jighmini. The manuscript first covers the principles of geometry necessary for the study of the heavens. There follows extensive coverage of the position of celestial ...

Das Buch der Natur (Book of nature) is a Medieval Latin compendium of science that was edited and translated into German in the 14th century by Konrad von Megenberg, a German scholar and writer who was probably born at Mainberg (Megenberg), near Schweinfurt, Bavaria, in 1309, and died at Ratisbon (Regensburg) in 1374. He studied at Erfurt and then at the University of Paris, where he taught philosophy and theology from 1334 to 1342. In 1342 he moved to Ratisbon, where he was a parish priest and a preacher. Later ...

Jabir ibn Hayyan (also known by his Latinized name Geber, circa 721–815 AD) was a Muslim polymath, natural philosopher, and alchemist. He was probably born in Tus, Khorasan, in present-day Iran, although some sources give his birthplace as Kufa, Iraq. Some aspects of the life of Jabir ibn Hayyan, as well as the authenticity of tens, if not hundreds, of the titles of his extremely large body of work have been questioned. More than 3,000 treatises or books are attributed to him in one way or another, with ...

This cosmography by Zakarīyā Ibn Muhammad al-Qazwīnī (circa 1203–83), Kitāb‘Ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharā’ib al-mawjūdāt (The wonders of creation, or literally, Marvels of things created and miraculous aspects of things existing), enjoyed great popularity in the Arab world and was transmitted in numerous copies for centuries. This version at the Bavarian State Library in Munich, Germany, is undated, but a strikingly similar manuscript in the National Library of France bears the date 1762. The script, style, and color spectrum of the depictions suggest that both manuscripts were produced ...

Zakarīyā Ibn Muḥammad al-Qazwīnī (1203–83) spent most of his life in present-day Iran and Iraq and served as a judge in Wasit and Hilla, Iraq, during the reign of the last Abbasid caliph, Musta‘sim (1240–58). Al-Qazwīnī was also a geographer and natural historian, and known for his encyclopedic knowledge. This work, Kitāb ‘Ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharā’ib al-mawjūdāt (The wonders of creation, or literally, Marvels of things created and miraculous aspects of things existing), probably was written in the sixth decade of the 13th century and is ...